Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday March 14, 2009 @10:23AM
from the pi-in-the-sky-legislation dept.

whitefox writes "The scoop from CNet is that 'The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and "engage them about the study of mathematics."' The resolution is available online. I doubt it'll ever become a national holiday, but the Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."

If we are going to use the Gregorian calendar, then we should probably see what Europe knew about Pi in 1592. According to Pi History [wikipedia.org], there was no significant contribution to the understanding of Pi in Europe after Archimedes until Ludolph van Ceulen [wikipedia.org] came up with a 20-digit approximation, in 1596. I'm afraid he was 4 years to late for Pi day.

I know just a few Europen languages, but here are some examples: "el 4 de julio", "4. juli" or "4th of July". We use either little endian (4th of July, 2009) or big endian (2009-07-04), but not middle endian (September 11th, 2001) like you do.

That you can do more things with e. (a^x)' = (a^x)*ln(a) and every formula with the for a^x can be rewritten to an e power. Furthermore e^(i*g) = cos(g) + i*sin(g) and e is used extensively in calculating odds. Pi has its uses but isn't so omnipresent as e is.

How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".

No actually I always say 14th March and I write it that way as well. That is how it is written and spoken in English. Even you Americans refer to the 4th of July and not July 4 so clearly you used to pronounce it that way but have somehow lost it over the years. So if you are speaking American you are probably correct (with the one exception) but when speaking/writing English the correct way is always 14th March 2009. If you don't knwo any English speakers then there is no reason for you to have known this though.

In Europe (actually, most places outside the US) we write DD-MM-YYYY or similar (DD/MM/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY etc). This seems more logical to me, as days are smaller than months, and months are smaller than years.In Japan, and in ISO date format, it's YYYY-MM-DD.

For a variety of reasons, the number 2pi (6.2832...) works out much better as a fundamental constant than Pi, and it simplifies many mathematical formulas. The linked article suggests that 2pi be labeled a 'turn'; so in that sense, 90 degrees is a quarter-turn; etc. Surprisingly insightful.

So while the rest of you jump the gun, I'll be celebrating on June 28th.:)